EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Professor William T. Liu is Visiting Senior Fellow at East Asian Institute (EAI). The author is grateful to Professor John Wong, Director of Research of EAI, for his advice to work on the background of this quasi-religious phenomenon as a companion piece to his own paper (Background Brief No. 39). The author is also grateful to Dr. Gu Xin for his valuable comments; to Mr. Gu Qingyang for gathering website information about Falun Gong; to Mr. Tam Chen Hee for his critical readings of the paper and valuable suggestions for corrections; and to many colleagues at EAI who also made valuable comments both during and after the internal seminar on this subject. Information obtained in this paper came from Li Hongzhi's lectures and his books, newspaper accounts and from personal interviews with followers and coordinators both in the USA and in Beijing prior to the crackdown, and from website information of the World Anti-Falun Gong Alliance, as well as messages of Master Li transmitted from the Falun Dafa website in Canada after the crackdown. The analysis of the phenomenon and about Master Li are already reported in Professor John Wong's Background paper, The Mystery of Falun Gong: Its Rise and Fall in China and shall not be repeated here.
